Kenya Grace has struck a chord with her song Strangers. The song, which describes how everyone is treated as interchangeable on dating apps, is a worldwide hit. The British singer herself never saw the success coming.
“That is almost incomprehensible for me,” Grace sighs when she hears that Strangers has been in the top five of the Dutch top 40 for eight weeks. “It still doesn’t fully dawn on me what’s happening. The fact that the song has touched so many people is really special.”
The South African-born British artist had been thinking about making a song about relationships in the age of dating apps for a while. “How you can be very close to someone and the next moment have no contact at all. That has become so normal, but that is actually not the case at all.”
25-year-old Grace drew on her own experience and that of the people around her. “You see how easily people ghost each other (stop responding to messages from one moment to the next and disappear from someone’s life, ed.). That is much easier if you know someone through a dating app than if, for example, you are with a friend of friends starts dating. Then you don’t just disappear. It’s a product of the times we live in.”
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Kenya Grace – Strangers
Grace made Strangers from scratch in her bedroom
No hit producers were involved in the success of Grace. The singer wrote and produced the song all by herself in her bedroom. When she then shared a fragment on social media, things went fast.
“People started making their own videos with the song and the numbers on TikTok and Instagram Reels skyrocketed. When the song hit Spotify, I was hoping to hit a million streams in two weeks, but I did in less than a day.”
The counter is now ahead Strangers on more than 330 million streams. Successor Only In My Mind has 11 million after just under two months. Grace herself tries not to pay too much attention to the numbers. “That’s not good for me. I try to be as free as possible creatively and I want to focus on that.”
‘My music style was shaped by going out’
Grace was brought up with creativity at home: her mother is a visual artist. “She has given me plenty of space to discover and develop that side of myself.” This is how the singer started with musical theater at school. “I loved that, but it’s so different from what I do now,” she says, laughing.
By this she refers to the fact that her music is now heavily influenced by electronic movements such as drum ‘n’ bass. How did she get there? “Going out. It was so exciting to discover completely new types of music. I went to illegal raves when I was way too young for that,” she says with a smile. “You really are a sponge at that age, you absorb it all. Those experiences shaped me musically.”
I had to learn to produce in order to express how I wanted my music to sound.
Kenya Grace
While studying at the British Academy of Contemporary Music, Grace worked overtime to master producing this sound. “I was already singing with other producers at the time, but I couldn’t really express how I wanted something to sound, so I had to learn how it works,” she says.
“I started messing around on my own after my classes. When I worked with others, I asked questions about everything in the process. I’ve worked a lot to get better over the past two years.”
That does not mean that the singer always wants to do everything herself. “I would love to do something with Flume (Australian hit producer, ed.). And if I can think big: it probably won’t happen, but a song with Lana Del Rey would be a dream.”
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Kenya Grace – Only In My Mind
2023-11-29 04:04:00
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